Love in Interstellar Space

I was listening to this NPR episode that included an interview with Annie Druyan where she talked about the moment she fell in love with Carl Sagan while working on The Golden Record which was being sent off to space on the Voyager.  It made me weepy.

"It was so romantic, and I had asked Carl whether or not it would be possible to compress the impulses in ones brain and nervous system into sound, and then put that sound on the record, and then think that perhaps the extraterrestrials of the future would be able to reconstitute that data into thought.

And he looked at me in - a beautiful May day in New York City, and said well, you know, why don't you go do it and - because who knows, you know, who knows what's possible in a thousand-million years? And so my brain waves and REM, every little sound that my body was making, was recorded at Bellevue Hospital in New York.  This was two days after Carl and I declared our love for each other, and so part of what I was feeling in me - recording of my brain waves. Part of what I was thinking in this meditation was about the wonder of love, and of being in love. And to know its on those two spacecraft. Even now, whenever I'm down, you know, I'm thinking - and still they move, 35,000 miles an hour, leaving our solar system for the great, wide-open sea of interstellar space." ~Annie Druyan

image from here and here

Underlined: Pale Blue Dot by Carl Sagan

My favorite part of this book:

Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.
Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.
The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.
It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.  -Carl Sagan

*image from here

Rainbow

Our little Shine turned one and all our loved ones came to celebrate her colorful day.  It was magical.

 I followed this recipe for her rainbow cake.  It was so much fun to make! (PS if you want your fondant and frosting to be bright white instead of off white don't use organic powdered sugar!)

Studio Shot

A little action shot of me hard at work in front of the easel working on my new series.  (And matching my artwork without even realizing it.)

One Year Ago Today

Happy Birthday my love.  My Shine.

March 22

One year ago to the hour I went into labor.  Almost thirty-five hours later I became a mother.
I have been a mother for one year.
I barely recognize the woman I was before I gave birth and nurtured my daughter throughout her first year of life.  (This is a good thing.)  I feel like a butterfly. We can fly and we will Shine.

Nighttime Out My Window

I have been staring at Jupiter and Venus outside my window every evening, amazed that I can see anything shining in the night sky with these bright city lights.  Since reading Carl Sagan's Pale Blue Dot, I have been feeling VERY small and insignificant in an extraordinarily beautiful and comforting way.  Spotting my friends Jupiter and Venus while listening to the city traffic zoom below me and enjoying the warm night air on my balcony has been quite dreamy, indeed.

Sunset: March 21, 2012

Design for Mankind Feature!!

Last Friday Design for Mankind blogged about my Spring Jewelry line!!

39 weeks

One year ago today.  Waddling all over the city hoping to get things moving. 

Sunset: March 20, 2012

Yesterday

Shine and sun

Good evening

Sunset March 19th, 2012

Underlined: Pale Blue Dot by Carl Sagan

I'm knee deep in Dr. Sagan's Pale Blue Dot and it has pretty much been blowing my mind in every way.  It's even changing the art I have been working on.  So far this is my favorite line:

(Sagan is talking about the Voyager)

  Or perhaps the records will never be intercepted. Perhaps no one in five billion years will ever come upon them. Five billion years is a long time. In five billion years, all human beings will have become extinct or evolved into other beings, none of our artifacts will have survived on Earth, the continents will have become unrecognizably altered or destroyed, and the evolution of the Sun will have burned the Earth to a crisp or reduced it to a whirl of atoms.

Far from home, untouched by these remote events, the Voyagers, bearing the memories of a world that is no more, will fly on.

 - Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space (1994)

*images from here and here

Star

Good day, beautiful star.  Felt like old times watching you set.

Joanne Greenbaum

I'm diggin' Joanne Greenbaum's work lately.

Easter Eggs

Since my Wooden Geode Ornaments were a big hit and sold out so fast last Christmas I decided to do an Easter version.  They are now available in my shop!
My intern Sam took all the photos.  Isn't she talented?

Hope

 We spent the weekend in Michigan and went for a couple of walks on the beach and enjoyed the beautiful warm weather.  Our bulbs are sprouting.  It looks like hope springing up from the ground. 

Good Morning

Friday Music Muse

This song makes me think of my husband and the first year we started dating.  Makes me smile every time I hear it.

M. Ward
I'll be Your Bird

I'm not the tiger, he never had,
I'm not the first hit when you got it bad.
I'm not your second, I'm not your third but
I'll be your bird.

I'm not your Chesnutt,
I'm not your Mould,
I'm not your DJ on late night radio,
I'll be the first one to ask where you were,
I'll be your bird.

Then when there's no one to care,
I could protect like I've always been there,
I'll become your bear.

I'll sing statistics, & hide the truth,
I'll tell your dad anything that you want me to,
I'll hide your locket under the dirt,
I'll be your bird.

*photo by one of my favorite photographers Simen Johan

Spring 2012 Inspiration

Here are a few images that inspired my Spring 2012 jewelry line.

Here, here, here, here, here , here, here and here